The New Performance Appraisal
I wrote an article recently that raised the question is the annual performance review dead? To be clear on my position, I’ve jumped with both feet firmly planted on the growing bandwagon of CEOs and senior HR leaders, predicting the end of the ineffective and universally despised annual performance review. Many have proposed throwing reviews out altogether. I’m not on that particular bandwagon. We all need feedback. Of course, we all prefer positive over negative feedback. Some of us have a hard time receiving negative feedback, while others welcome it and see such feedback as a means to an end: self-improvement.
In that last post, I proposed that the fix lies in creating a better appraisal, one that is tied to job role competencies. We can go a step further. Millennials, who now represent more than half the workforce and growing, view training and the opportunity to experience various roles and responsibilities as the path to self-improvement. Relevant training and experiences that allow them to move up, across freely, or down the career lattice are highly desirable and promote engagement and retention.
“Creating engagement strategies is one of management’s big goals. But managers who have developed successful strategies for retaining boomers are going to have put those strategies in the corporate archives,” said Jay Gilbert in The Millennials: A new generation of employees, a new set of engagement policies. “Creating strategies to engage millennials requires a whole different approach — and strategy.”
While giving employees the ability to explore different career options by navigating a company’s career lattice, whether on paper or by application, this alone is insufficient to achieve a return on investment in training, mentoring, and otherwise developing employees. There still needs to be a way to assess this investment's efficacy in employee performance and ensure a positive return.
I contend that we must replace the current annual performance review with a systematic competency-based approach to talent management that blends performance, employee career aspirations, and development in one cohesive system putting the employee’s career aspirations at the center. Today, several products on the market claim to improve employee engagement by providing a job role navigator and suggestions for training and experiences that an employee might follow to transition from one role to the next. However, these applications don’t relate the suggestions to the actual performance required to succeed or the employee’s future progression path.
The very best applications on the market effectively blend continuous feedback, goal management, competency-based assessments, 360 feedback, career path exploration, and development into a comprehensive and cohesive system designed to maximize returns on individual employee investments, driving improvements to the top and bottom lines, and dramatically improving engagement and retention.
When you are searching for a tool to assist in this process, be sure to:
- find one that links assessment to an employee’s talent profile so that you can assess proficiency levels,
- demonstrates all available next moves within their existing department and beyond, and
- serves up a personalized career development plan.
P.S., If you’d like to learn more about the right way to develop your talent and retain your top performers, visit TalentGuard’s free learning center.
Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.
Author’s Bio
Frank Ginac’s career spans over 30 years of building world-class enterprise software. A hands-on leader, Frank is the chief software architect of TalentGuard’s award-winning software suite and leads the team that develops the company’s innovative solutions. At TalentGuard, Frank is able to blend his passion for employee development and his breadth and depth of experience building complex software systems for global deployment to help create the leading workforce intelligence platform in the market today. He is the author of two books, including Building High-Performance Software Development Teams and Customer-Oriented Software Quality Assurance. Frank holds a BS in Computer Science from Fitchburg State University and an MS in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he specialized in Interactive Intelligence (the branch of Artificial Intelligence focused on creating intelligent and adaptive systems that interact with humans on their own terms).
“The work I most enjoy is writing code. It’s an endeavor that requires a high degree of creative problem-solving and collaboration. It’s through the collaborative and social process of code writing that I’ve been able to exercise my passion for leading the brilliant and creative people who have produced dozens of enduring and award-winning software products over the course of my career. Together, we have changed for the better how businesses operate, how students learn, and with my latest venture TalentGuard, how businesses help their employees grow in their careers. Most important, at the end of every line of code I’ve written or helped to write there’s a person whose day I’ve somehow made better.”
